Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films Including Masterpieces, Oddities and Guilty Pleasures (with Just a Few Disasters)
By David Thomson
Allen Lane £22, 1024 pages
Thomson manages, almost alone among modern writers on cinema, to combine length with pithiness. In this viewer’s guide to the great and good, from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Zabriskie Point, a thousand favourite films are given 500 words each. A peerless guide to what you should buy at the DVD store.

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
By Richard Brody
Faber £30, 720 pages
Jean-Luc Godard has long deserved a writer who seeks the human being inside the intellectual whirling dervish. Brody’s thoroughgoing critical biography is fierce when necessary, fair elsewhere and well-researched everywhere. He is even illuminating on the obscure later works: check in here for help with Germany Year Zero and Eloge de l’Amour.